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Applied Linguistics Review 2016; 7(4): 449–470

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Applied Linguistics Review 2016; 7(4): 449–470 Applied Linguistics Review 2016; 7(4): 449–470 Zhu Hua* and Li Wei “Where are you really from?”: Nationality and Ethnicity Talk (NET) in everyday interactions DOI 10.1515/applirev-2016-0020 Abstract: The article examines the significance of questions such as “where are you really from?” in everyday conversational interactions. Defining this kind of talk as nationality and ethnicity talk (NET), i. e. discourse that either explicitly or inexpli- citly evokes one’s nationality or ethnicity in everyday conversation, the paper discusses what constitutes NET, how it works through symbolic and indexical cues and strategic emphasis, and why it matters in the wider context of identity, race, intercultural contact and power relations. The discussion draws on social media data including videos, blogs, on-line comments and the authors’ observa- tions, and focuses on NET around Asian people living outside Asia. It argues that the question “where are you really from” itself does not per se contest immigrants’ entitlement. However, what makes difference to the perception of whether one is an “interloper”–someone who is not wanted – is the “tangled” history, memory and expectation imbued and fuelled by power inequality. Keywords: nationality and ethnicity talk, folk theory of race, stereotype 1 Introduction “Where are you from?” is a question I like answering. “Where are you really from?” is a question I really hate answering… For Asian Americans, the ques- tions frequently come paired like that…. More than anything else that unites us, everyone with an Asian face who lives in America is afflicted by the perpetual foreigner syndrome. We are figuratively and even literally returned to Asia and ejected from America. (Wu 2002: 79, italics original) In the above quote, Frank Wu, the first Asian American law professor at Howard University Law School, shared his experience about the perpetual *Corresponding author: Zhu Hua, Birkbeck College, University of London, Malet St, London WC1E 7HX, UK, E-mail: [email protected] Li Wei, UCL Institute of Education, 20 Bedford Way, London WC1H 0AL, UK, E-mail: [email protected] Brought to you by | UCL - University College London Authenticated Download Date | 2/6/17 1:47 PM 450 Zhu Hua and Li Wei foreigner syndrome, a problem facing many Asian Americans in everyday social interactions. He made a point about how discrimination against a group of people is instantiated through recurrent and seemingly innocent questions. In this article, we will focus on this kind of discourse and examine how ques- tions such as “where are you really from?” in everyday talk could reflect people’s flawed assumptions about others, resulting in exclusion and marginalisation of certain social groups and contributing to banal racism, a kind of racism which is routinized and inconspicuous. We will refer to this kind of discourse as Nationality and Ethnicity Talk (NET), the discourse that either explicitly or implicitly evokes or orients to one’s national or ethnic membership. We will explore how people do nationality and ethnicity talk (NET) in everyday interac- tions and discuss what constitutes NET, how it works, and why it matters. We will draw on social media data including videos, blogs, on-line comments and the authors’ observations, and focus on NET around Asian people living outside Asia. 2 What is nationality and ethnicity talk (NET)? NET includes questions and comments which, frequently occurring in small talk, are aimed to establish, ascribe, challenge, deny or resist one’s ethnicity or nationality. The questions and comments range from direct ones (e. g. “Where are your people coming from?”, “When are you going back?”, “Is it as hot as this where you are from?”, “What is it like back home?” to more subtle ones (e. g. “Your English is so good!”, “You must be used to cheese by now.”). Although we say that NET can be explicit or implicit, we do not mean that it is a matter of “either or” in a specific encounter. The degree of explicitness is very often a matter of interpretation, depending on who is speaking to whom, and whether there is a match between intended and perceived implicature. NET is essentially an act of identity calibration and involves categorisation and positioning of self and others and stance-making. Sacks (1972) uses the notion of membership categorisation device (MCD) to explain how people order indivi- duals into categories such as family, mother, student, British, etc, according to some conventional expectations about what constitute normative behaviour of a category. One category could be race and ethnicity, and we will discuss folk theory of race in the next section. When someone displays a certain set of features or carries out certain actions typically associated with a category (i. e. category- bound activities, in Sack’s terms), she would be cast as a member of that category. In some later studies, category-bound attributes are extended from activities and Brought to you by | UCL - University College London Authenticated Download Date | 2/6/17 1:47 PM Nationality and Ethnicity Talk in everyday interactions 451 features to predicates such as rights, entitlements, obligations, knowledge, com- petences, etc (e. g. Hester and Eglin 1997). Through these category-bound attri- butes, activities and predicates, participants activate the necessary and relevant contextual features and make relevant certain aspects of their own identities or those of others, intentionally or inadvertently. The key for category-bound attri- butes to become identity markers lies in their symbolic and indexical value. Parallel to the process of categorisation, participants also strategically take up subject positions and engage in acts of positioning themselves (Davies and Harré 1990) and stance-making. The latter is defined as “a public act by a social actor, achieved dialogically through overt communicative means, of simulta- neously evaluating objectives, positioning subjects (self and others) and others, and aligning with other subjects, with respect to any salient dimension of the sociocultural field.” (Du Bois 2007: 163). Myers (2006) shows how the stance of conversation partners can make a difference to the way people answer the questions such as “where you are from” and turn a routine response to a more extensive one which people either revise or construct collaboratively in subse- quent exchanges. The following analysis of a scripted conversation in a YouTube video clip “What kind of Asian are you?” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v = DWynJkN5HbQ) illustrates how acts of categorisation, positioning and stance-making are played out during a conversation involving NET. 2.1 Selected transcription of the NET talk from YouTube video “What kind of Asian are you?” Context: A white man (M) tried to strike a conversation with an Asian-looking young woman (W) who is doing exercise. 1 M: hi there 2W:hi 3 M: nice day huh? 4 W: ya finally right? 5 M: (sounding surprised) where’re you from. your English is perfect 6 W: San Diego. we speak English there 7 M: (looks confused) ah no <whe: re:: are:: you:: fr::om> 8 W: well (.) I was born in Orange County but I never actually lived there = 9 M: = um I mean before that 10 W: before I was born 11 M: ya, well (.) where are your people from? Brought to you by | UCL - University College London Authenticated Download Date | 2/6/17 1:47 PM 452 Zhu Hua and Li Wei 12 W: well (.) my great grandma was from Seoul 13 M: (delighted) Korean. I knew it. I was like she’s either Japanese or Korean but I was leaning more towards Korean 14 W: (in a flat tone) amazing 15 M: hh (bowing with hands together at front) gahm-sah-hahm-ni-da there’sa really good teriyaki barbecue place near my apartment. I actually really like kimchi. (Transcription conventions: = no gap between two turns; < > talk produced slowly and deliberately; : lengthening of the preceding sound; (.) a very short untimed pause; word: speaker emphasis) In the video, the man, who was surprised by the woman’s English, began to look for the answers he was hoping for by asking questions one by one: “where are you from?”, “before that?”,and“where are your people from?”. The clip also contains implicit NET. His comment “Your English is perfect” in Turn 5, despite being a compliment, positioned the Asian-looking woman as a non-native English speaker, therefore a foreigner, someone who does not belong to an English- speaking country like the US. The NET talks are accompanied by his further stance-making in Turn 7 through his speech adjustments and rendition of patron- ising ‘foreigner talk’ (Ferguson 1975) when he went out of his way to slow down and emphasise every syllable in his question of “where are you from”.InTurn13, he was “thinking aloud” and talked about his categorisation which seemed to rely upon the woman’s physical appearance. In the last turn, the guy was trying to display his cultural assumptions about Korea. He started the utterance with a bow which is more stereotypical of Thai rather than Korean style, accompanied by a tokenistic (Thurlow 2010), but completely out of the context, use of a Korean phrase, “gahm-sah-hahm-ni-da”,meaningthank you.Hethenreferredtoater- iyaki barbecue place and made a comment about “Kimchi”. Needless to say, these cultural assumptions and references are superficial and essentialised. The woman made several attempts to resist the man’s positioning and in doing so, displayed her stance. She used the first person plural pronoun “we” in Turn 6 to depersonalise the matter. This is in contrast with the emphasis on “your people”, a plural address term used by the man in Turn 11. In Turn 8, she ignored the man’s ascription of non-native English speaker/foreigner who needs to be spoken to slowly, provided an account of her connection with Orange County in an attempt to routinize the conversation.
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